Metacognitive Factors Affecting English as a Foreign Language (EFL) Student-writers’ Academic Writing Performance

Academic writing has a significant role in university education and shapes students’ academic ability. For English as a foreign language (EFL) students, writing is a communicative, goal-oriented, laborious process with emotive, behavioral, metacognitive, and cognitive components. Previous studies have provided insight into specific aspects of metacognition in writing, but there is a lack of synthesized research integrating these components to understand how they collectively influence the academic writing performance of EFL student writers. To fill this gap, this study investigated how metacognition theory contributes to the academic writing performance of EFL students from the perspectives of metacognitive knowledge, experience, and strategies. A total of 370 Chinese EFL student writers were invited to complete one academic writing test and three questionnaires in a classroom setting. The resulting data were analyzed using PLS-SEM. Metacognitive knowledge, experiences, and strategies were found to be positively related to academic writing performance. The results also revealed that, among 10 parameters of metacognition, academic writing performance was more strongly correlated with procedural knowledge, metacognitive feeling, metacognitive estimate, online metacognitive strategies, monitoring, and evaluating parameters. These findings underscore the importance of developing students’ conditional knowledge and promoting effective metacognitive strategies, particularly in evaluating and monitoring, to improve academic writing skills among EFL students.